Making a Way through Stories

Karen Johnson.

While driving out of my neighborhood yesterday morning I noticed
a new sign on Laramie Avenue.Bright
yellow, it proclaimed its location “safe passage,” referring to the program the
city of Chicago runs that stations adults on corners before and after school so
children can walk with less fear of violence, especially in neighborhoods like
the vibrant, under-resourced, black inner-city community where I currently live.I can’t help but contrast the experience of
these children, who live with little security, with the upbringing of most of
the children in the suburb of Wheaton (where I am moving for my new job!) who experience
far less domestic violence and don’t have to worry about being shot on their
way to school.Race and class continue
to divide our nation in ways not apparent for those without eyes to see.

What does this all have to do with history?In the July 2013 Magazine of History, Lendol Calder wrote a fantastic article about
the importance of bringing stories back into the history classroom.His research suggests that his students think
that history is just one damn thing after another, kind of like the Billy Joel
song “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” Since
they have no narrative of the past, students find little meaning in it.Calder ends with a call to “tell stories that
assign meaning to the past while allowing students to articulate and refine
their own understanding of history with the help of teachers, peers, and voices
from the past.”The stakes are high:
virtues like the “courage to state one’s deepest beliefs and subject them to
examination, and the empathy to see the plausibility in stories not one’s own.”

Historians, I believe, do have an important role to play in
bringing reconciliation to the nation.This summer, I had the opportunity to talk with Chris Rice, the co-director of Duke Divinity School’s Center for Reconciliation.Chris offered perspective on how American Christianity’s
practice of “reconciliation” has changed in the past 30 plus years, and he also
encouraged me to, as a historian, tell stories that are not only consistent
with the disciplines of our guild, but that can help people see alternate ways
of living that seek to break down, rather than build up, walls.

Chris defines reconciliation as creating a “new we,” of
people coming together across the lines that divide them and forming a new
community.This process is messy, necessitates
incarnation, or being physically present with one another, and requires
grace.It means embracing strange bodies
– bodies different from oneself – on strange ground, in places that can often be
uncomfortable.But like historian David Wills ("The Central Themes of American Religious History: Pluralism, Puritanism, and the Encounter of Black and White, in African-American Religion: Interpretive Essays in History and Culture (1997)) who argues that the defining
factor in American religious history has been the racial divide, Chris, too,
thinks that American Christianity’s greatest captivity has been along racial
lines.There have been moments of hope,
certainly, and moments of change – such as the slave religion that emphasized
freedom not bondage, and the civil rights movement that sought to create a
beloved community.

In his own life, Chris, who is white, has embraced what he calls strange
bodies in strange places.He grew up in
South Korea as a missionary-kid where he saw his parents wrestle with what
constituted the gospel.Would it address
the here and now, in addition to the eternal?As a young adult, Chris lived and worked in inner-city Jackson,
Mississippi for 17 years with the Voice of Calvary where he realized that he
was not the solution to poverty, but that the task of conversion to
reconciliation requires incarnation and grace.Next, he moved to Duke Divinity School where he learned the importance
of bridging the academy and practitioners’ worlds.Words and theology mattered.Now, his perspective has shifted to the
global, and he is involved in Africa and starting a new program in East Asia.He disagrees with Philip Jenkins, who argues
that the center of Christianity has shifted to the global South.Using a different lens than Jenkins, Rice
points out that Christians in the global south do not embrace the triumphalism
that was so prominent in the West.Instead, they realize that often their Christianity has failed to bring
about wholesale conversions – a case in point: in Rwanda, Christians killed other Christians
in violent acts of ethnic cleansing, despite their supposed unity in
Christ.Rice affirms that the Age of the
Missionary is gone – the age in which American Christians, coming from the
Christianized west sent out missionaries to evangelize (and sometimes create in
their own cultural image) unreached people groups.Instead, Rice argues that we should consider
ourselves in an Age of Mutuality, in which Christians in America and Christians
in the global south need one another and learn from one another.

Since Chris began his work with reconciliation, he has seen
a number of changes.Perhaps the biggest
is that American Christians are talking actually about it, and are talking
about justice.As he puts it, justice
has become “sexy” – but perhaps something without cost – and in the research I
have done, reconciliation always costs something for people on both sides.In addition, the increased emphasis on
diversity has brought about good things, but can also serve to stunt
reconciliation’s growth.Diversity may
be good, Chris points out, but toward what end?Is it just to celebrate?Just to
have different people present?From a
Christian perspective, Chris argues that the gospel goes deeper, and its
purpose is to bring together in a new sort of community different people.Success, the advancement of talk of
reconciliation, is a danger, because it becomes a cause people can support
without much effort, without practicing what black evangelical leader John
Perkins (founder of Voice of Calvary) has called the three R’s: relocation, or proximity to people on the
margins, reconciliation, or the creation of the “new we” and redistribution, or
the sharing of economic resources and social capital, and the engagement in
economics and politics for the sake of the vulnerable.These three R’s, Chris points out, are not
the way to solve poverty, but rather a means of grace, or an ecclesiology – a
theology of church.The danger, Chris
thinks, is that reconciliation will become an event, something that can be put
in a simple box and packaged.He points
to the Promise Keepers version of reconciliation, which Emerson and Smith talk
about in Divided by Faith, as
something that is shallow because it does not remember the hurt that
reconciliation heals.

And that is a job for historians.We play an important role in both uncovering
the hurt of the past – with how religion and race have combined to fragment the
beloved community – and also uncovering the possibilities, the alternative
pathways not taken, those moments of hope, forgiveness, justice and
reconciliation.Historians can tell
stories that allow “safe passage” for others to enter into this messy,
dangerous, and exhilarating work of reconciliation.

Comments

Thanks for these reflections, Karen. Calder also has a thoughtful essay on teaching in the Confessing History collection, although, if you ever get to hear him speak, his "live acts" are second to none!